Friday, January 25, 2013

Oh, those ancient navigators! Thor Heyderdahl may have had it backwards when he suggested it was travellers from Peru (South America) who settled some of Polynesia, but he showed in 1947 that the trans-Pacific voyage could be done using technology available at the time.

From sciencemag.org

Clues to Prehistoric Human Exploration Found in Sweet Potato Genome

by Lizzie Wade on 21 January 2013, 3:00 PM

Europeans raced across oceans and continents during the Age of Exploration in search of territory and riches. But when they reached the South Pacific, they found they had been beaten there by a more humble traveler: the sweet potato. Now, a new study suggests that the plant's genetics may be the key to unraveling another great age of exploration, one that predated European expansion by several hundred years and remains an anthropological enigma.

Humans domesticated the sweet potato in the Peruvian highlands about 8000 years ago, and previous generations of scholars believed that Spanish and Portuguese explorers introduced the crop to Southeast Asia and the Pacific beginning in the 16th century. But in recent years, archaeologists and linguists have accumulated evidence supporting another hypothesis: Premodern Polynesian sailors navigated their sophisticated ships all the way to the west coast of South America and brought the sweet potato back home with them. The oldest carbonized sample of the crop found by archaeologists in the Pacific dates to about 1000 C.E.—nearly 500 years before Columbus's first voyage. What's more, the word for "sweet potato" in many Polynesian languages closely resembles the Quechua word for the plant [linguistic "borrowing"].

Studying the genetic lineage of the sweet potato directly has proved difficult, however. European traders exported varieties of sweet potato from Mexico and the Caribbean to the Pacific, and those breeds mixed with the older Polynesian varieties, obscuring their genetic history. Therefore, it's difficult to apply information culled from modern samples to older varieties without a prehistoric control.

Now a team of researchers working with France's Centre of Evolutionary and Functional Ecology and CIRAD, a French agricultural research and development center, has identified one such temporal control: sweet potato samples preserved in herbariums assembled by the first European explorers to visit many Polynesian islands. The study, which is published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides strong evidence for prehistoric contact between Polynesia and South America.

By analyzing genetic markers specific to sweet potatoes in both modern samples of the plant and older herbarium specimens, the researchers discovered significant differences between varieties found in the western Pacific versus the eastern Pacific. This finding supports the so-called tripartite hypothesis, which argues that the sweet potato was introduced to the region three times:first through premodern contact between Polynesia and South America, then by Spanish traders sailing west from Mexico, and Portuguese traders coming east from the Caribbean. The Spanish and Portuguese varieties ended up in the western Pacific, while the older South American variety dominated in the east, which would explain the genetic differences the French team saw.

The decision to analyze herbarium specimens is "innovative" and provides another piece of strong evidence for the tripartite hypothesis, says archaeologist Patrick Kirch, of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study. Lead author Caroline Roullier emphasizes that although her genetic analysis alone doesn't prove that premodern Polynesians made contact with South America, it strongly supports the existing archaeological and linguistic evidence pointing to that conclusion. "It's the combination of all different kinds of proof" that's really convincing, she says. Anthropologist Richard Scaglion of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania agrees, "All the lines of evidence coming together … really strengthens the case" for Polynesian contact with South America.

Italian researchers have unearthed a marble benchmark which was once used to measure the shape of Earth in the 19th century.

Called Benchmark B, the marker was found near the town of Frattocchie along one of the earliest Roman roads which links the Eternal City to the southern city of Brindisi.

Placed there by Father Angelo Secchi (1818-1878), a pioneer of astrophysics, the marker consisted of a small travertine slab with a metallic plate in the middle. The plate featured a hole at its center.

Geodesic "Benchmark B" near Frattocchie, Italy.

“The hole was the terminal point of the geodetic baseline which run in the ancient Appian Way near Rome, between the tomb of Cecilia Metella, a daughter of a Roman consul, and a tower near Frattocchie,” Tullio Aebischer, a cartographical consultant at the department of mathematics and physics of Roma Tre University, told Discovery News.

Geodesy is a science that deals with the size and shape of the Earth and the determination of exact positions on its surface. Essentially the figure of the Earth is abstracted from its topographical features — and a baseline is the fundamental requirement for computing the triangulation of a region. In order to determine the extension of the “triangle,” it is necessary to know the exact distance between two points: A, the starting point, and B, the ending point.

In this way, networks of triangulation can be spread over entire countries and continents.
While Benchmark A, the starting point of the baseline, was found in 1999 in front of the Cecilia Metella mausoleum, nothing was known of the Benchmark B’s whereabouts.

“We found it after a long archival research and a georadar survey. The discovery will allow us to precisely verify the ancient measurements with modern GPS technologies,” Aebischer said.

“The measurements along the Appian Way were part of surveys which began in the middle of the 18th century and spread all over Italy, in Europe, especially in France and Lapland, and in South America. The aim was to measure the shape of the Earth,” Aebischer said.

In 1735 the Académie Française proposed the verification of Isaac Newton’s theory about the shape of the planet Earth. Newton (1642-1727) predicted the Earth to be an oblate ellipsoid, thus several scientific expeditions were carried in the attempt to assess the length of one degree of a meridian measured at different latitudes.

In 1750 Pope Benedictus XIV commissioned the measurement of the length of the meridian arc stretching from Rome to Rimini and passing through St. Peter’s dome. To do so and to produce a geodetic triangulation of the Papal States, the Jesuits Christopher Maire (1697-1767) and Roger Boscovich (1711-1787) measured a baseline between the tomb of Cecilia Metella and an anonymous ruin near the town of Frattocchie.

“The area was chosen because of its smooth and straight ground. In addition, in a geodetical baseline, the markers A and B must be visible from the other points of the triangulation. Here we had a mausoleum and a ruined tower,” Aebischer said.

Maire and Boscovich’s results were heavily criticized by the French engineers in the beginning of the 19th century, and a long scientific dispute began. The quarrel was started by Secchi a century after the publication of the Jesuits’ results. The astronomer re-measured the Boscovich geodetical base between November 1854 and April 1855. The baseline measures 12,043.14 meters (39,511.61 feet) .

The newly discovered benchmark will most likely remain in its original place just as benchmark A remains hidden under a manhole in the middle of the road at the Cecilia Metella mausoleum.

“These are historical markers and must be valued as an important heritage for the knowledge of a territory,” Aebischer said.

As you can see, many of the ladies are, at present keeping up pretty right and tight with the male players, who are interspersed in and around them with 3.5 and 3.0 points.

I am SO happy to see Salome Melia as the top female after 4 rounds! After having had a very good year in 2009, her play leveled off -- guess she was busy being romanced because she got married a few years ago :) I have seen her name showing up in more events during the latter part of 2012. Keeping my fingers crossed she has a great showing at Gibraltar! The female competition will be fierce, because the first price will not be shared (all other prizes below will be totaled and split up among players with tied scores):

No reports from today at the official website yet -- but I see at Chess-Results.com that Stefanova was black today against USA's Gata Kamsky, who took the full point, moving his score to 3.5 and it looks like all of the ladies playing the higher rated players fell to defeat today. Boooooo!

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Jan. 21, 2013 — Ancient DNA has revealed that humans living some 40,000 years ago in the area near Beijing were likely related to many present-day Asians and Native Americans.

An international team of researchers including Svante Pääbo and Qiaomei Fu of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced nuclear and mitochondrial DNA that had been extracted from the leg of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, China. Analyses of this individual's DNA showed that the Tianyuan human shared a common origin with the ancestors of many present-day Asians and Native Americans. In addition, the researchers found that the proportion of Neanderthal and Denisovan-DNA in this early modern human is not higher than in people living in this region nowadays.

Humans with morphology similar to present-day humans appear in the fossil record across Eurasia between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago. The genetic relationships between these early modern humans and present-day human populations had not yet been established. Qiaomei Fu, Matthias Meyer and colleagues of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, extracted nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from a 40,000 year old leg bone found in 2003 at the Tianyuan Cave site located outside Beijing. For their study the researchers were using new techniques that can identify ancient genetic material from an archaeological find even when large quantities of DNA from soil bacteria are present.

The researchers then reconstructed a genetic profile of the leg's owner. "This individual lived during an important evolutionary transition when early modern humans, who shared certain features with earlier forms such as Neanderthals, were replacing Neanderthals and Denisovans, who later became extinct," says Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who led the study.

The genetic profile reveals that this early modern human was related to the ancestors of many present-day Asians and Native Americans but had already diverged genetically from the ancestors of present-day Europeans. In addition, the Tianyuan individual did not carry a larger proportion of Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA than present-day people in the region. "More analyses of additional early modern humans across Eurasia will further refine our understanding of when and how modern humans spread across Europe and Asia," says Svante Pääbo.

Parts of the work were carried out in a new laboratory jointly run by the Max Planck Society and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

What I do not understand is how the organizers, who have in prior years hosted several strong female players in the B and C groups, failed so miserably this time around. I mean - really? Yeah, I get that they want to feature players from the home country. Okay, but NO FEMALE PLAYERS IN GROUP B? One female player in Group C rated 2402 when there are dozens to choose from in the wider world rated 2500 and above, who would surely be more competitive. And Hou Yivan for Group A? What? GM Antoneta Stefanova would give a better result in the A Group, for one! Geez. Wonder what went on. Was it a matter of money? Did they not offer enough up front to the best female players in the world to make it worthwhile for them to come to Wijk aan Zee? Was it, instead, a deliberate decision to shut out the best female players and set up the THREE that are playing for total, abject failure?

I won't be covering the rest of this event. I mean, I only care about the female players and the tournament the organizers put together this year that used to feature top female players is just - bullshit!

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"Advanced Chess" Leon 2002

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I'm one of the founders of Goddesschess, which went online May 6, 1999. I earned an under-graduate degree in history and economics going to college part-time nights, weekends and summer school while working full-time, and went on to earn a post-graduate degree (J.D.) I love the challenge of research, and spend my spare time reading and writing about my favorite subjects, travelling and working in my gardens. My family and my friends are most important in my life. For the second half of my life, I'm focusing on "doable" things to help local chess initiatives, starting in my own home town. And I'm experiencing a sort of personal "Renaissance" that is leaving me rather breathless...